XY Media Ventures has launched DailyXY.com, replacing its four city-oriented websites with a single online destination.
The company, which was founded in 2006 by author and journalist Russell Smith, copywriter Steven Bochenek and Peter Coish, former head of Lowe RMP (now DraftFCB), initially launched a series of sites geared toward men 25-40 in Toronto, Vancouver, Montreal and Calgary.
While content was similar across the four sites–including articles about style, health, technology and relationships–much of the material was geared toward residents of each city.
According to Coish, the idea of consolidating into one online location came about last year, when he and his business partners concluded readers were having difficulty navigating within and between the different sites.
“We realized last fall that we had about 1,200 stories on our websites and it wasn’t easy to find anything,” said Coish. “We wanted to make the user experience more enjoyable, and from a business point of view, to increase page views, we wanted to make sure that we were suggesting content for people to read, which is not something we had been doing in the past.”
The relaunch also comes with additional blogs and other new content features, developed by XY’s principals along with DailyXY.com editor Ben Leszcz, who joined the company in May.
“We worked out a strategy that still included the city-oriented content that we publish every day, but we added on more opinion pieces,” said Coish. “The other piece is, we’re taking a page from websites like the Daily Beast or the Huffington Post, which curate the web and go out and find stories that are interesting to their readership. We’re doing that here, but through a guy’s lens.”
Coish’s new agency, Cloud Advertising, handled the design of the site–the firm’s first major assignments.
Coish plans to introduce the agency more formally over the next several months, but describes its model as unique in its disregard for geographical boundaries. While he expects a physical office to open in Toronto by the end of the year, contributors to Cloud projects will come from all over the world.
The DailyXY.com relaunch provides a glimpse of Coish’s formula, as it was built with contributions from advertising, design and technological specialists from Canada, the U.S., the U.K., Romania, Argentina and the Netherlands, while a team from India handles site maintenance.
“It will be a full-service agency and it will have physical locations, but the agency will pull together smart people from around the world to develop all manner of advertising,” said Coish. “It’ll leverage that global brain that is now possible with the Internet.”
Coish said both readers and advertisers have responded favourably to the revamped site since it went live in May. Advertisers on DailyXY.com include BMW, Stella Artois, RBC and Telus.
